Archive for date:
April, 2013

Published on: Sunday, 28 April, 2013

A speculative idea that we could be the history of life's second chapter

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is on life in space:

A provocative calculation by two biologists suggests that life
might have arrived on Earth fully formed—at least in microbe
form.

Alexei Sharov of the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore
and Richard Gordon of the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in
Panacea, Fla., plotted the genome size of different kinds of
organisms against their presumed date of origin. Armed with just
five data points they concluded that genome complexity doubles
every 376 million years in a sort of geological version of Moore's
Law of progress in computers.

Published on: Friday, 19 April, 2013

Private innovation in currencies is a good thing

I have a column in the Times on bitcoins and their
implications for private money

Bitcoins — a form of digital private money — shot
up in value from $90 to $260 each after Cypriot bank accounts were
raided by the State, then plunged last week before recovering some
of their value. These gyrations are symptoms of a bubble. Just as
with tulip bulbs or dotcom shares, there will probably be a
bursting. All markets in assets that can be hoarded and resold — as
opposed to those in goods for consumption — suffer from bubbles.
Money is no different; and a new currency is rather like a new
tulip breed.

Yet it would be a mistake to write off Bitcoins as just another
bubble. People are clearly keen on new forms of money safe from the
confiscation and inflation that looks increasingly inevitable as
governments try to escape their debts. Bitcoins pose a fundamental
question: will some form of private money replace the kind minted
and printed by governments?

Published on: Sunday, 14 April, 2013

My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall
Street Journal is on junk DNA and on the messed up genome of the
HeLa cell.

The usually placid world of molecular biology has been riven
with two fierce disputes recently. Although apparently separate,
the two conflagrations are converging.

The first row concerns the phrase "junk DNA." Coined in
1972 by the geneticist Susumu Ohno, it is an attempt to explain
why vast stretches of animal genomes, far more in some species than
in others, seem to serve no purpose. Genes of all kinds and their
control sequences make up maybe 9% of the human genome at the very
most. The rest may be nonfunctional "junk," mainly there because it
is good at getting itself duplicated. Yet the phrase has always
caused a surprising amount of offense. Reports of the discrediting
of junk-DNA theory have been frequent.

Published on: Monday, 08 April, 2013

The cold spring weather and what it means

I wrote The Spectator diary column this week:

We’ve discovered that we own an island. But dreams of
independence and tax-havenry evaporate when we try to picnic there
on Easter Sunday: we watch it submerge slowly beneath the incoming
tide. It’s a barnacle-encrusted rock, about the size of a tennis
court, just off the beach at Cambois, north of Blyth, which for
some reason ended up belonging to my ancestor rather than the
Crown. Now there’s a plan for a subsidy-fired biomass power station
nearby that will burn wood (and money) while pretending to save the
planet. The outlet pipes will go under our rock and we are due
modest compensation. As usual, it’s us landowners who benefit from
renewable energy while working people bear the cost: up the coast
are the chimneys of the country’s largest aluminium smelter —
killed, along with hundreds of jobs, by the government’s unilateral
carbon-floor price in force from this week.

There were dead puffins on the beach, as there have been all
along the east coast. This cold spring has hit them hard. Some
puffin colonies have been doing badly in recent years, after
booming in the 1990s, but contrary to the predictions of global
warming, it’s not the more southerly colonies that have suffered
most. The same is true of guillemots, kittiwakes and sandwich
terns: northern colonies are declining.